Dennis,
I believe jeff Gilder very succinctly above summed up the value of using Wikipedia and I should have known better.
In fact, here in North Carolina, our Republcan party majority head in the NC Legislature has found himself under attack this week for citing Wikipedia... he was as off kilter as I was.
That said, let me say that Joe Kelly, his wife Ruth and the late Eddie Anderson have been treasures - promoting, broadcasting and preserving motorsports history in the Richmond, Virginia area. I have great respect for all three.
Eddie was a very polished broadcasting executive who took on the role of "Troubleshooter" for the late Roy H. Park of Roy H. Park Broadcasting, Inc. and its multitude of properties. Eddie traveled all over the country for Roy "fixing" troubled radio and television properties. He did many things behind the scenes in his broadcasting executive capacity that folks will never know about to ensure the broadcasting of stock car racing information from the late 50s onward.
To see Eddie in his big cowboy hat in the P.A. booth at Southside Speedway or Brunswick Speedway in Lawrenceville, Virginia, you'd never know he was a slick, polished, very well spoken broadcasting executive. His daily "5th Turn " program on WXGI was the bible of Richmond motorsports, as was his collaboration later with Joe Kelly on the Sunday pre-race shows on WXGI.
I first knew of Joe when he was doing P.A. at Southside in the 60s with Eddie. When Joe became the Southside Speedway promoter I was managing the Wrangler Jeans NASCAR program in Greensboro, NC. Joe approached me and I outfitted all the Southside Speedway personnel in Wrangler products in the 80s.
When I returned to Richmond in January 1990 to work for Paul Sawyer at RIR as his Media Relations Director, I began to have much more interaction with Eddie, Joe and Ruth appearing often on their radio shows as well as Joe and Ruth's weekly racing television show on Blab-TV.
Joe is a treasure trove of racing history and many folks confuse him with the late Pennsylvania stock car racer who ran under the name Joe Kelly. Joe had some pretty scary motorcycle racing escapades... in fact, "our" Joe raced motorcycles at Occoneechee.
Richmond has been blessed to have broadcasters like Eddie Anderson and Joe and Ruth Kelly as well as award winning motorsports writers like Randy Hallman, Jerry Lindquist, Harold Pearson, Ben Blake, Keith Parsons, Rea White and Nate Ryan. I am lucky to have counted them all as my friends.
Add to that photographers of the caliber of our own Richmonder, Ray Lamm, and its understandable why Humpy Wheeler once said if the border to Virginia ever closed, so would Charlotte Motor Speedway.
I hope you keep finding old racing news and photos and correcting the errors you see.
Here's a little memory I have of Joe & Ruth:
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"Any Day is Good for Stock Car Racing"
